As hurricane season approaches, Horry County officials discuss lessons learned from Florence

With only a few weeks away from the official start to hurricane season, Horry County emergency officials invited the community to gather and discuss what was learned from Hurricane Florence and how the county is still recovering from storms as far back as the ice storm of 2014.

With only a 30% compliance rate of people in the county who listened to the warnings and evacuated for Hurricane Florence, emergency management officials are working to make that a higher number for this season in the event of a big storm.

“There is no reason to believe we are not going to see more of what we’ve been through,” said Randy Webster, Director of Horry County Emergency Management.

Describing the county as an island when flood waters took their course, Webster says a lot was learned in regards to how roadways can be improved.

“I didn’t realize how many people live on the western side of the county, that work on the eastern part of the county, and the impact that was having economically,” said Webster.

The county says they are working on getting more federal resources for recovery like the $25,000 resilience grant that was awarded in December.

“We are working with some of our financial institutions to develop home owner assistance programs,” said Courtney Kain, Director of Community Development.

Horry County superintendent Dr. Rick Maxey spoke of the challenges of getting everyone back into the classroom after the storm.

“At one time, we had seven hundred teachers who could not come back, when you have about 2300 teachers, that’s a significant number of your teaching class.” said Maxey.

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